Weekend box office – Bad Boys shoots to the top, Dolittle sinks

Well, consider me surprised… again! After debuting to unexpectedly solid reviews last week, Bad Boys for Life has replicated that critical success at the box office. With a production hell that had lasted decades and one-half of the titular misbehaving male children not having been a box office draw in ages, both industry pundits and Sony itself predicted that the Will Smith and Martin Lawrence buddy cop action comedy would have a modest 4-day Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend somewhere around $28 million. Instead, Bad Boys for Life blew away all expectations as it opened in the top spot in the US. The film is currently on $59.2 million with that figure expected to top out around $68 million once today’s holiday totals are in as well.

That not only blows past Bad Boys II’s $46.5 million opening back in 2003, but also beats Ride Along’s $48.6 million opening in 2004 to become the second-largest MLK weekend opening ever. Only American Sniper’s $107.2 million has been bigger on the holiday. Even when you take that extra day out of the equation though, the $59.1 three-day opening is Sony’s largest R-rated debut ever, beating out 2014’s 22 Jump Street. Internationally, Bad Boys for Life is still to open in several key markets, but it’s already brought in another $36 million. Sony couldn’t be happier that this franchise has been revitalized like this.

When it came to Universal though, they could have been much, much happier this weekend past. After picking up a massive $175 million price tag for Dolittle, the Robert Downey Jr. led fantasy-adventure adaptation is probably going to lose the studio big money despite opening in second place domestically. Plagued with all sorts of production issues, Dolittle got broadsided by terrible reviews and officially sunk this weekend past as it could only debut to a creaking $22.5 million. Even with the extra $7.5 million it’s expected to earn today, that still leaves the film on a hell of a deficit. Internationally, Dolittle has been earning slightly better though as it opened in several markets over the course of the last two weeks already, over which time it’s brought in an extra $50 million.

With both newcomers out of the way at the top, that left the holdovers to fight for the remaining scraps. And it was last week’s king, 1917, that emerged the best as it just narrowly lost out on the second place to Dolittle. The Oscar-favourite WWI drama had $22.1 million three-day total, with that figure rising to $27 million over the holiday. In the battle for fourth and fifth place though is where the second surprise of the charts is found, as Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker fell much sharper than expected, leaving Jumanji: The Next Level to come out ahead despite being on the charts a week longer than its sci-fi blockbuster competition. The Rise of Skywalker has now officially crossed the $1 billion mark globally as expected, but the chances of it catching up to predecessor The Last Jedi’s $1.3 billion is very slim.

At least The Rise of Skywalker’s drop was tiny when compared to Like a Boss. There was nothing bossy about Paramount’s female-led comedy as it plummeted all the way from fourth to ninth in its second weekend on the charts with a massive 69% plunge. Despite a very meagre price tag of just $29 million, it’s probably still going to lose a bunch of money. Ouch.

Let’s see what the rest of the US box office chart looks like:

NE = New Entry

Last Updated: January 21, 2020